Amazing how difficult it is to be banned here. You're at least more concise than Thierry Atheist was.

Kamelito LovelessPosts 9122 Jan 2020 21:39

igor majstorovic wrote:

@Kamelito Loveless Ok let's make this constructive, this was the one. Kickstarter rejected me two times with explanation that this is not innovative enough and that it is not for them.

In the end you succeeded, for KS at least you tried so no regrets.

Mark Mc FaddenPosts 822 Jan 2020 23:08

Mr Niding wrote:

@Mark Mc Fadden

I was thinking the same thing when I saw this thread.

Thanks man, glad im not the only one :)

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

Mark Mc Fadden wrote:

I dont like this attitude, this is disingenuous to Stephens work and progress,

Hello Mark,

We discussed technical facts.

- Discussing problems allows you to understand them. - When you have the understanding then you can give advices. - If advices are followed this can lead to an improvement.

The idea of an open source 68k accelerator is good. This idea is not new, already in the 80th AMIGA and ATARI Magazins did publish "open-source" the plans to several simple accelerators similar to the TF520 / TF530.

If any discussion can leads to improvements on the Terrible Fire then this is good for all users of it.

I think there are 3 areas which could be reviewed.

a) Bus access. b) E-Clock c) Caps

a = can improve performance b = can improve compatibility c = can improve stability of the card and is important for the live time of the chips

I have to admit, that I'm very annoyed about the missing caps on the Terrible Fire cards.

Adding enough caps is crucial for stability and reliability of the card - and its also crucial for the live time of the CPU.

When I look at the Terrible Fire cards, then my first though is "NOT ENOUGH CAPS". Is the reason for this laziness or lack of "knowledge"? If its lack of knowledge then such discussions - can help to provide the knowledge.

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

Mark,

Lets make clear here:

we are not doing unqualified bashing or ranting here.

We talk about technical problems and we can offer advice.

I think you know that our advice is highly qualified. Everyone in the AMIGA scene does know that our Memorycontroller and our Buscontroller are second to none and outclass all other Amiga cards. Its obvious that we perfectly understand the topics and we can give expert advice. And we are willing to help.

Regarding the CAPs topic I'm disappointed. Mainly because I raised this topic in good faith not long ago, and was told that there would be XX caps on the 060-card, but I could only count halve of them.

Gunner, i understand what you are saying and i agree completely that that version of the card can be subject to some interesting analysis( and honestly i enjoy such analysis ), however that is not how it is being portrayed here, technical analysis should be unbiased and non political.The thread title is "Why Is TerribleFire 160 Times Slower Than Vampire?", not "Interesting analysis of an underperforming Accelerator", the OP also reiterates the same "In fact its only providing a 160th fraction of the performance of a Vampire....." in a sales pitch/one-upmanship. A technical discussion does not need this and a biased technical discussion is not a technical discussion.

Igor's comments in this thread are a prime example of keeping a technical discussion technical and only technical and he does a fantastic job of it.

If it is to be a valid and unbiased technical discussion, change the title and remove performance comparison in the OP with the vampire( its pointless anyway a valid argument here would be to compare with various 14MHz 68020 cards for A500 or higher clocked 68020 cards.Again i have no interest creating an account to a forum just to be complaining( or telling you what to do ), i'm simply giving my honest( and what i consider quite fair ) opinion and i feel there's already enough non-sense in the Amiga community unfortunately that this sort of comparison with Vampire is not warranted and achieves nothing in the context of an open technical discussion on the under performance of the card.

M RickanPosts 17423 Jan 2020 02:09

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

You can today buy V500/V600/V1200 and V4SA. No other card is planned.

So reading between the lines, the next generation of the Vampire will be ASIC?

Sean SkPosts 35523 Jan 2020 05:42

Adam Whittaker wrote:

Cock sucker

Grow up! What are you, a child?

Gunnar von Boehn(Apollo Team Member)Posts 476523 Jan 2020 06:41

m rickan wrote:

So reading between the lines, the next generation of the Vampire will be ASIC?

No - I did not mean this.

ASIC production does cost a huge a mount of moneyand we do not have this yet and we are also not there in our development cycle.

What I tried to say is that designing, testing and producing the Vampire card needs a huge amount of time.I think this should be clear.We have today no free time available to develop more models.This means for the next 2 yearsI do expect that the current models are it.We might maybe make a small change on the V1200 so that it physically also fits CD32 but there are few resources to develop more models. Maybe there might come a modified card for e.g. the A3000/4000 but I can not promise any dates yet.Our main effort will go into continue to produce the existing models to continue to support these models and to developcore improvements like 3D core or GOLD 3 release,help to test and improve AROS and ATARI EMUTOS.

My feeling is that its in the best interest for all to produce the amount of cards that the people wantand to support them best possible.

I see very little sense in "splitting" the communityand splitting our team support capacity by creating unnecessary number of sub models. E.g card with less memory, or cards with no video.

Kyle Blake(Needs Verification)Posts 108/ 123 Jan 2020 14:41

For all our sakes don't even daydream about new models when there's work still to do on the existing ones.

When V4 becomes feature complete and as reasonably possible bugfixed, then it makes sense, not a moment later.

I have my own daydreams about a bigger vampire standalone, but I'm not going to go begging or bothering people for it.

Chris SanzPosts 2523 Jan 2020 19:52

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

m rickan wrote:

So reading between the lines, the next generation of the Vampire will be ASIC?

No - I did not mean this.

ASIC production does cost a huge a mount of money and we do not have this yet and we are also not there in our development cycle.

What I tried to say is that designing, testing and producing the Vampire card needs a huge amount of time. I think this should be clear. We have today no free time available to develop more models. This means for the next 2 years I do expect that the current models are it. We might maybe make a small change on the V1200 so that it physically also fits CD32 but there are few resources to develop more models. Maybe there might come a modified card for e.g. the A3000/4000 but I can not promise any dates yet. Our main effort will go into continue to produce the existing models to continue to support these models and to develop core improvements like 3D core or GOLD 3 release, help to test and improve AROS and ATARI EMUTOS.

My feeling is that its in the best interest for all to produce the amount of cards that the people want and to support them best possible.

I see very little sense in "splitting" the community and splitting our team support capacity by creating unnecessary number of sub models. E.g card with less memory, or cards with no video.

So I guess this means there will be no V4 for A500? I'm having a bad day now.

Markus BPosts 17923 Jan 2020 21:24

@Chris

This was stated quite some time ago.I think only Vojin refused to accept that fact.

Markus BPosts 17923 Jan 2020 21:34

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

You can today buy V500/V600/V1200 and V4SA. No other card is planned.

I think it makes some sense to publish this important information more prominently.

There are still people around who have hopes for all kind of mentioned possible products in the future. Somehting for the CD32, A3000/4000 and V4 versions as accelerators.Vojin even makes new models up as he goes. If I remember correctly, his ASIC version is the Vampire V6. ;-)

Absolutely no offense intended, as I can totally understand the huge amount of effort needed to support and develop the current line of products. But I observe that this is not clear to everyone out there.

Gunnar von Boehn(Apollo Team Member)Posts 476523 Jan 2020 21:45

Markus B wrote:

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

You can today buy V500/V600/V1200 and V4SA. No other card is planned.

I think it makes some sense to publish this important information more prominently.

There are still people around who have hopes for all kind of mentioned possible products in the future. Somehting for the CD32, A3000/4000 and V4 versions as accelerators.

You are right.Stuff like a CD32 version is very likely to come sooner or later- as CD32 and A1200 is the same and only some "wire" change is needed. But today we know hundreds of people wait for the Vampire.We should support them now and focus on production instead spend month on different model design.

Kyle Blake(Needs Verification)Posts 108/ 123 Jan 2020 23:24

Would it be possible to just make passive adapter for CD32?

Come to think of it, i'm sure there's already some extended i/o board for cd32 with serial port, floppy connector etc that also gives a1200 cpu slot. But I might remember that wrong.

John HeritagePosts 11025 Jan 2020 09:39

Gunnar - TF520 does much better on Atari ST :

EXTERNAL LINKWhat bus differences would explain this? Is STs main bus accessed every two cycles instead of four?

Gunnar von Boehn(Apollo Team Member)Posts 476525 Jan 2020 10:38

John Heritage wrote:

Gunnar - TF520 does much better on Atari ST :

Thats a very good question.The bus cycle on AMIGA and ATARI is the same.Its always 4 Cycles.

The TF520 is a very simple card.It basically only has the CPU and nothing else on it.Therefore the memory of the mainboard is used.The bus to the main board becomes now very important.If the access for example is not done in 4 cycle but in 5/6 cycle,then the performance will be severely affected.

The timing on the AMIGA bus is "very short" in some areas.The timing on the ATAIR is slightly different.It could be that a minimally delay on a signal like ASwill create a 5/6 access on the Amiga but mightstill be OK for a 4 cycle access on the ATARI.

Someone would need to scope the bus to verify this.

There were other cards on AMIGA begin similar and suffering from the very same problem. Who can name one?